Palestinians revive dream of a Gaza seaport

Monday

Aug 11, 2014 at 6:18 PM

By Jodi Rudoren THE NEW YORK TIMES

SHEIK EJLEEN, Gaza Strip — An unmarked dirt lot about the size of a football field, on a cliff above the crashing waves of the Mediterranean, could be a crucial element in ending the monthlong battle between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

It was here that a European contractor began building a commercial seaport back in July 2000, only to have its work destroyed by Israeli tanks and bombs within three months. Now, Palestinian leaders trying to negotiate terms in Cairo for a durable truce have made the revival of the seaport project a prime demand.

The port has become the embodiment of Palestinian aspirations to break the siege of Gaza, at once an icon of independence and a potential economic engine that would reduce the territory's reliance on increasingly hostile neighbors. First promised by the Oslo Accords in 1993, the idea of a seaport — or at least an interim proposal for a floating pier under international supervision — has won some backing from Europe, Egypt and the United Nations, albeit with caveats to address Israeli security concerns.

Gazans "view this as a steppingstone toward exercising some greater sovereignty over their own borders," said Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit research group. "It's enormously important practically and symbolically. It is establishing that there are these two powers that are squeezing us from both ends, and we are now going to change that situation and create a new opening for Gaza."

The price tag for a port would top $100 million, with the money likely to come from European donors. Construction would take at least three years. Although the seaport was included in three previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements, Israel insists that Gaza must first be disarmed.

Sari Bashi, founder of Gisha, an Israeli nonprofit group that promotes expanding access to and from Gaza, said that while a seaport "could open new horizons," it would not address the most basic complaint of Gaza's 1.7 million residents: They cannot travel freely — most notably to Jerusalem, to Israel and to the West Bank, where many have relatives they have not seen in years.

"The seaport is a focal point for negotiators — the extent to which it's a top priority for the population is an open question," Bashi said. "A seaport is not going to reunite families. It's not going to help farmers and manufacturers to market in Israel and the West Bank. It's not something that's going to have an immediate effect."

Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that dominates Gaza, agreed to hold their fire for 72 hours starting at midnight on Monday, a truce that the Egyptians brokering the talks have said should be enough time to hammer out an agreement. Besides the seaport, topics of discussion were expected to include the reopening of the Rafah crossing between southern Gaza and Egypt with Palestinian Authority guards — not Hamas — on patrol; an increase in goods and people allowed through Israeli-controlled crossings; a doubling of the permitted fishing zone to 12 nautical miles; and the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the remains of an Israeli soldier killed early in the conflict.

One person anxiously awaiting a green light from Cairo is Ziad Obaid, a civil engineer who has been working on the seaport project for most of his adult life. Obaid's business cards say "Assistant Chairman Seaports Authority, Palestine." He works for the Palestinian Authority, not the Hamas government that ruled Gaza from 2007 until June, and says he has a staff of 20.

Obaid has not gone to the office since the latest conflict began because, he said, the only key is lost in the rubble of an employee's destroyed house. But he pulled up decade-old schematics of the planned port on his laptop and showed off the site, as he did to visiting maritime experts, environmentalists, engineers and politicians, as recently as a few months ago.

In 2005, the plans for the seaport envisioned three berths that could receive two million metric tons of cargo a year; given Gaza's population growth, he thinks the seaport should be reimagined to handle 8 million tons. The project was slated to cost $70 million to build in three phases then; today, he estimates it at $120 million.

A British-French-German document regarding cease-fire arrangements drafted last week included a call to study "the implementation of an internationally-supervised mechanism to enable trade to and from Gaza by sea." Several people who have been briefed on the Cairo talks said that would most likely mean, at first, a temporary pier a short distance from the shoreline, with ships mainly carrying humanitarian goods between Gaza and Cyprus, where European and perhaps even Israeli monitors would ensure security.

Egyptian leaders are "on board" with the idea, according to Thrall, the analyst, because it "relieves them of pressure" in terms of opening Rafah for commerce and, more broadly, of taking responsibility for Gaza's future. The Israeli government seems open to the idea of a floating pier, though they consider a permanent port possible only as part of an overall peace deal.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the cease-fire talks are supposed to be secret, said previous agreements promising a seaport "also promised a demilitarized Gaza Strip," adding, "we would see that as a total prerequisite." Pointing to a weapons-laden ship that Israel seized on the Red Sea in March, the official said of the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, "Why does he want to have his own port? So he can bring in military equipment."

Six years after the Oslo Accords ordered the establishment of the Gaza Seaport Authority, the 1999 Sharm el Sheik agreement between Israel and the Palestinians called the seaport "a special case" and said "the two sides" would have to agree on security measures for its construction and operation. Construction was halted when Israel blocked certain materials from entering Gaza; Obaid said the Palestinians had paid a European company $5 million for a contract that was left unfulfilled after Israel, responding to attacks at the start of the second intifada, destroyed the administrative buildings the company had erected on the site.

In 2005, the U.S.-brokered "agreement on movement and access" in Gaza said construction could commence anew, and that Israel would "undertake to assure donors that it will not interfere with operation of the port." Instead, Hamas won elections the next year, abducted an Israeli soldier, and later routed the Palestinian Authority from Gaza, leading to a clampdown by Israel on border crossings.

The port would create 2,000 permanent jobs, Obaid said, and save the Palestinians millions of dollars a year in fees for extra security measures to import and export through the Israeli port of Ashdod. Passenger ferries could provide an alternative to severely limited and cumbersome international travel through Rafah to Cairo or through Israel and the West Bank to Amman, Jordan.

The designated site, next to a wedding hall and a swimming pool not far from the former Israeli settlement of Netzarim — evacuated along with others in Gaza in 2005 — includes 500 acres of former farmland that the Palestinian Authority purchased from private owners years ago. Dried brush dotted with a few yellow flowers creeps along the corners. A rusted monkey bar sits on one side; the remnants of a cinder-block shed on the other.

The makings of a road down to the sea remain. It was dug 14 years ago, around the time that the oldest of Obaid's six children was born.

"People here, when I used to tell them I was working for a port, they would say, 'There is no port,'" Obaid said. "Now people are saying there will be a port, this is your time."